On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences

by Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California—Los Angeles

Sometimes political theorists like to imagine that they are lonely humanists misplaced in social science departments. In fact, political theory was created as part of a political science composed of both humanistic and social-scientific elements. Rather than trying to locate political theory somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences, we should instead dismantle the boundary between the two and create a unified discipline of questioning that embraces both kinds of inquiry.

Sheldon Wolin, who did so much to give the field of political theory its modern shape, had a distinctive account of its task. Political science in the 1950s was dominated by pluralism and behavioralism and these movements, he believed, had a fissiparous effect on our view of politics. They focused on parts at the expense of the whole. The last page of the first edition of Politics and Vision leaves his readers with an exhortation in the opposite direction: “Citizenship provides … an integrative experience which brings together the multiple role activities of the contemporary person. … [therefore] Political theory must once again be viewed as that form of knowledge which deals with what is general and integrative to men, a life of common involvements.”1What sense can we make of this perspective today, at a time when political theory itself has become increasingly pluralistic and when its relation to political science is very different—closer in some respects, with political theorists increasingly involved with contemporary, empirical projects, yet further away in others?

Can the Biomedical Research Cycle be a Model for Political Science?

by Evan S. Lieberman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In sciences such as biomedicine, researchers and journal editors are well aware that progress in answering difficult questions generally requires movement through a research cycle: Research on a topic or problem progresses from pure description, through correlational analyses and natural experiments, to phased randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In biomedical research all of these research activities are valued and find publication outlets in major journals. In political science, however, a growing emphasis on valid causal inference has led to the suppression of work early in the research cycle. The result of a potentially myopic emphasis on just one aspect of the cycle reduces incentives for discovery of new types of political phenomena, and more careful, efficient, transparent, and ethical research practices. Political science should recognize the significance of the research cycle and develop distinct criteria to evaluate work at each of its stages.Read the full article.

Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?

by Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism. Read the full article.

The ‘Tribal Politics’ of Field Research: A Reflection on Power and Partiality in 21st-Century Warzones

by Romain Malejacq, Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Management Research (@afghanopoly) and Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Columbia University

Can fieldwork still be done in today’s most violent warzones? We contend that long-held methodological principles about power and impartiality do not hold in today’s conflict-ridden environments. Research of this kind can still be pursued, but only if the scholar’s place is reconceived as one of limited power and unavoidable partiality. We argue that those still able to do fieldwork in sites of increasing danger do so by virtue of building their own ‘tribes,’ forming and joining different social micro-systems to collect data and, in some cases, survive. Field research must, therefore, be recognized as its own form of foreign intervention. In considering the future of political science research in the most challenging war-torn settings, we examine the risks and opportunities that accompany ‘tribal politics’ of this kind and underline the importance of reflecting on our own positionality in the process of knowledge production. Read the full article.

Visualizing War? Towards a Visual Analysis of Videogames and Social Media

by Nick Robinson, University of Leeds, UK and Marcus Schulzke, University of York, UK

Political scientists are increasingly engaged with the importance of the “visual turn,” asking questions about how we understand what we see and the social and political consequences of that seeing. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers is developing methods that can help us understand visual politics. Much of the literature has fallen into the familiar qualitative versus quantitative methodological binary, with a strong bias in favor of the former, and has consequently been unable to realize the advantages of mixed-methods research. We advance the study of visual politics as well as the literature on bridging the quantitative versus qualitative divide by showing that it is possible to generate quantitative data that is rooted in, and amenable to, qualitative research on visual phenomena. Our approach to conducting mixed-methods research is an alternative to the more common strategy of seeing various research methods as an assortment of tools, as it is directed at developing an organic relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy for research on visual politics by discussing our own efforts to create a dataset for quantifying visual signifiers of militarism. Read the full article.

Nick Robinson is Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on the militarisation of social media and the politics of videogames, with specific focus on military games. His recent publications in this area have appeared in Political Studies, Critical Studies on Security, Political Quarterly and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. He is presently working on a book for the Popular Culture and World Politics book series (Routledge) on Videogames and War. His research is funded by a four-year
Framework Grant from The Swedish Research Council entitled, ‘Militarization 2.0: Militarization’s Social Media Footprint Through a Gendered Lens’.

Scholarship on militant organizations and rebel movements emphasizes the effects of fragmentation and disunity on military and political outcomes. Yet this scholarship’s focus on formal, durable, and externally observable aspects of organizational structure omits the social practices that constitute, reinforce, and reproduce intra-group schisms. How do intra-organizational divisions calcify into permanent cleavages? What processes reproduce factions over time? Using the case of Fatah in Lebanon, I argue that informal discursive practices—e.g., gossip, jokes, complaints, storytelling—contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of intra-organizational factions. Specifically, I focus on how networks of meaning-laden, money-centric discourse structure relations among militants who identify as being “Old Fatah.” I demonstrate that while these practices frequently originate in the organizational realm, cadres subsequently reproduce them within kinship, marriage, and friendship networks. This “money talk” between age cohorts within the quotidian realm connects younger members of Fatah to older cadres through collective practices and conceptions of organizational membership. These practices both exemplify an intra-organizational schism and constitute, in part, the faction called Old Fatah. Examining how symbolic practice comprises social structure thus provides important insight into the politics of organizations such as militant groups, social movements, and political parties. Read the full article.

Lines of Demarcation: Causation, Design-Based Inference, and Historical Research

by Matthew A. Kocher, Yale University and Nuno P. Monteiro, Yale University

Qualitative historical knowledge is essential for validating natural experiments. Specifically, the validity of a natural experiment depends on the historical processes of treatment assignment and administration, including broader macro-historical dynamics. But if validating a natural experiment requires trust in the ability of qualitative evidence to establish the causal processes through which the data were generated, there is no good reason for natural experiments to be considered epistemically superior to historical research. To the contrary, the epistemic status of natural experiments is on a par with that of the historical research on which their validation depends. They are two modes of social-scientific explanation, each with its own pros and cons; neither is privileged. We illustrate this argument by re-examining an important recent contribution to the literature on violent conflict: Ferwerda and Miller’s 2014 natural experiment estimating the causal effect of the German decision to devolve authority to the Vichy French government on violent resistance during World War II. Read the full article.

A Discussion of Stephen Macedo’s Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy and the Future of Marriage

by Scott Barclay, Joseph J. Fischel, and Jyl J. Josephson

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids legal discrimination against same-sex marriage. The decision sent shock waves throughout the country, with both supporters and opponents regarding it as signal of dramatic shifts in public opinion and a revolutionary development on the road to sex-gender equality. Just two days earlier, on June 24, 2015, Stephen Macedo’s Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage was published. Macedo has always worked at the intersection of legal theory, normative theory, and public policy, and Just Married offers a nuanced liberal democratic defense of marriage equality with striking resonance in light of Obergefell. We have thus invited a range of scholars on LGBT rights, and LGBT politics more generally, to comment on his book.

Jyl J. Josephson, Rutgers University-Newark

The Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges has left many of us thinking about what Stephen Macedo says is the main question of this book: “what’s next for marriage?” (12). Organized around three questions, each of which take up three chapters: “Why same-sex marriage? Why marriage? Why monogamy?” (13), the book takes its cues from conservative opposition to same-sex marriage. So the real question of the book seems to be “what’s next for conservative arguments for marriage?” There is much that is useful here, and much that is left on the table at the end of the book—which is to say that on such a broad topic, no book, as Macedo notes, can address all of the important questions.